fleeced

I spent Yarndale weekend with my Dad up at his house just outside York, where he works as a shepherd looking after a flock of Hebridean sheep established for conservation grazing. In addition to the sheep, he is a highly respected breeder and trainer of working Border Collies or Sheepdogs as you might know them. If you’ve seen One Man and his Dog this is what he does!

He has been training Border Collies for as long as I can remember and I never tire of watching these intelligent dogs work the sheep. Twelve-month old Lou is showing great potential…

Hebrideans are a hardy, primitive breed of sheep and have featured on the blog several times before. They are easy to recognise being of a fairly small but tough build, with dark fleeces ranging in colour from the deepest blue-black through shades of brown and into grey as the sheep grow older and most of the animals will have horns which grow quite large in the rams.

As a knitter and crocheter I look at the sheep and automatically see wool and the potential to build a stash that would keep me busy for a lifetime. And so as we enter Wool Week, I should be really excited about the opportunity to celebrate this magical fibre which at one time formed the backbone of the British economy, but the current value being placed on British clip prices (the cost of a raw fleece) and the prices being paid to the vast majority of farmers for their fleece is heartbreaking.

At first glance you would think things aren’t so bad and that maybe there are still riches to be made from keeping sheep for their woolly coats. A full list of prices paid is available on the British Wool Marketing Board website and as this poster displayed at a recent auction demonstrates you can ‘maximise the value of your wool’. I have to do a fair amount of talking in averages as clips vary from breed to breed, and so to make life easier I am weighing a single fleece at 1 kilogram – some will be more and other will be less. It is also important to note that the Wool Board has the monopoly on buying fleeces from British farmers which is why the prices are governed in such a way.

Earlier this year Dad received a cheque from the Wool Board for approximately 300 fleeces sent to them in 2014. The grand total of the cheque was 94p and represents 10% of the total he hopes to receive, placing a value of £9.40 on the fleeces and averaging out at 3p per fleece. It cost him £1.20 to have each sheep shorn with this cost set to rise to £1.40 next year. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out a loss of £1.17 for each sheep being clipped. According to the Wool Board website Dad could have hoped to achieve approximately 40-50p per fleece or a low estimated total of £120 for the fleeces he sent. Although this still wouldn’t cover the cost of having the flock shorn – something which is vital for their wellbeing – it would have gone further than the £9.40 he did receive.

Whilst the potentially achievable prices displayed on the Wool Board website at first glance seem okay, a farmer of Swaledales is still losing around 60p for every sheep he has clipped and this is without taking into account the cost of transporting the bales of raw fleece to the Wool Board which is an additional cost incurred by the farmer. In addition to this bales are penalised for not being tied with the correct string, fleeces are dumped if damp or too scraggy and the farmer receives nothing for these and it’s unlikely that an explanation will be given as to why the final pay cheque is so low.

Dad has often spoke of sheep farmers burying or burning their fleeces; The latest horror stories include 3000 Swaledale fleeces buried somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales, and to illustrate the point further he calls a fellow shepherd who keeps a few Blue Faced Leicester sheep in his flock. So bearing in mind that BFL is a much sought after fleece at the moment – simply ask the knitters – and the price paid for BFL is relatively high owing to the fairly small yield from each animal, I almost cried when I heard the reply to what he had done with his fleeces: “Burnt ’em John, burnt ’em”.

It is a familiar story and one I hear over and over again. How has the state of the British wool industry come to this?

Unless you have made a conscious decision to trace and work with British wool, the vast amount of yarn you find in stores or in your stash will be imported fleece via China, South America and Australia. The traditional British yarn companies such as Rowan, Patons and Sirdar (for example) who all have the perfect opportunity to work with British fleece tend to be retailing yarn spun abroad from fleeces sourced pretty much everywhere apart from Britain. I want to make it clear that I am not saying you must rush out and only buy carefully sourced British wool and only ever knit with this (I currently don’t), but we as knitters and crocheters have a lot of buying power to support sheep farmers and elevate the prices being paid for this incredible fibre to something closer to decent and fair.

As much as I want to support Wool Week and the Campaign for Wool, this darker side of the British wool industry makes me so angry. I really want to see both these campaigns support and promote British wool rather than just wool in general. Wouldn’t it be great to see something similar to the way fleece is treasured, marketed and sold in Gotland but on a much larger scale? With the right approach I don’t think it’s impossible to bring back the golden days of wool production to parts of the country that are crying out for job creation in industries we Brits are really very good at.

And so to the 2015 clip from Dad’s flock: It is currently bagged and tagged, sitting in a dry barn with the occasional fleece being pulled out and used around the estate to protect trees. At the weekend me and Dad took a big step and are embarking on an adventure to have the fleece spun into yarn. It’s very exciting, slightly nerve-wracking, and we’re not entirely sure where it will lead, but we hope you can join us for the journey.

If you are a farmer/shepherd/small holding owner and have any experience dealing with the Wool Board I would love to hear from you. Please use the contact form to send me any information all of which will remain confidential.

Comments

Hi, I don’t deal with the board as I only have 13 sheep, but I am into craft needle felting spinning and weaving, I have a very small small holding so can not keep all the colors of wool I want, so started to ask around other sheep owners offering £5. a fleece and generally I have had my hand bitten off.

Glad to hear you are sourcing local fleeces and offering a fair price for the raw fleece – it sounds like you make good use of them too! Thank you so much for commenting, it’s great to hear how different craftspeople are putting the fleeces to use.

Good grief. What an eye opener, and what hypocrites! So basically the Wool Board expects you to support Wool Week and British farmers and fleeces when they don’t even support them themselves! I’m not surprised that the poster above me (Kay) is having her hand bitten off if she’s offering five quid a fleece. What can we, as consumers, do to help the farmer’s though? If we buy yarn labelled as 100% British, or grown and spun in the UK, we think we’re doing the right thing, but it sounds like we’re just perpetuating the bigger issue through our unintentional ignorance. I think this would be a good topic for a follow up post.

I think buying truly British yarn is a good thing – the more we buy the more demand there will be and the prices should rise accordingly. This has happened with BFL which has become so popular over the last few years. I’ll be posting regular updates as to how the project is going so keep an eye out for follow-ups!

I buy fleeces from 3 farms in the Morecambe Bay area of Lancashire where many of the sheep are conservation grazers.I handspin,weave and knit and also have some fleeces millspun into knitting/weaving yarn.Its a niche market and selling a straightforward no-nonsense bit of wool when there are so many fancy yarns to catch the textile crafters eye isn’t easy but I really love doing it.I hope in a very small way it helps sheep farmers get some recognition for their skills and hard work, helps keep the few small wool spinning mills in the country working.and of course the sheep are helping with their conservation work! I’m looking at the moment for an online retailerof British/local wool to sell for me,any contacts would be most welcome,Kate

Sounds as if having a monopoly Wool Board is a Bad Idea. Maybe introducing some form of competition – like offering specific breed fleeces to artisan spinners and dyers at Fair prices is the way to go? And yes, I do realise that that would all make for far more work for the already overworked shepherd, but 60p per fleece? Seriously?

I think the CFW are doing a good job raising peoples awareness and I’ve been told that the clip prices are improving. But obviously I haven’t heard the whole story from all sides.
I went to source some fleece for a project I’m working on, and paid £3 a fleece for 10 Jacobs. I was happy and the farmer was happy, however, when it came to sorting it properly the majority of it was of no use. It was supposed to be all shearling but it obviously wasn’t and I ended up with only 5kgs of fleece that I will be able to send away for spinning into hand knitting yarn and probably about 30% of this will be lost in the process.
I have no idea how the BWMB decide what they are going to pay for fleece, but I do know that not all fleece is suitable for hand knitting.
I do think we should support British farmers and I would like to have more British and local yarn in the shop, I am working on it.
I look forward to hearing more about your yarny adventures . Great blog post, very interesting,
thank you,
Adrienne

It’s a good point about Campaign for Wool raising awareness – Mr K has said a similar things to me; “surely any wool promotion is better than none”. Very true, I just wish Wool Week was ‘British’ Wool Week just like ‘Shetland Wool Week’ and feel they are missing a trick when we have such a great homegrown product to push. I need to do more research and find out more about both CFW and Wool Week and obviously both these campaigns go beyond using fleece for knitting. The processing wastage is something I’m not looking forward to and have been told to expect a loss of approximately 30% when the fleeces are sorted. This is partly one of the reasons why the farmers receive less as the fleeces are sorted and the raw weight is reduced. Anyhow, I’ll be keeping you all updated along the way and hopefully I’ll have a product at the end of this process!

Very interesting. Does the Wool Board sell it to individual companies, indie dyers at inflated prices? !f so that does not seem fair. Surely farmers should receive more. I can see the sense of keeping the whole process in hand like Blacker yarns do. I will listen with interest as a knitter I would like to support the whole journey of the wool.

The Wool Board acts as a broker and from what I understand the prices being paid are determined by the international market – I need to check this and do some more research but will post clearer information about it all once I know more. Thank you so much for your support.

This is terrible! Thank you for posting – I’d love to hear any ideas on how to best support the British sheep farmers. I grew up in West Wales (I now live in England) and when I started knitting a couple of years ago I was looking forward to knitting the wool from the sheep I grew up surrounded by. The more I look into it the more I realize it’s just not that straightforward and I’ve failed to find a local source of Welsh wool despite being knee deep in sheep in West Wales. I’d love to become better educated in this and feel a better sense of connection with the wool I knit with every day.

I know Helen Ingram of woolly chic has fleece spun from relatives sheep in Wales. There’s an alpaca farm somewhere local to me West Berkshire that dumps fleeces in the field. I think this all comes back to the slow fashion idea and people going back to having less but paying more.

I’m gathering a list together of retailers and places where you can buy British and local yarn and will post this on the blog in due course, but in the meantime Woolsack have a list of resources. Like you say, it seems crazy to be surrounded by sheep and yet finding wool to knit with direct from the flock is very difficult. It was this that I loved on a recent trip to Gotland. In the meantime if you hear of anywhere please do let me know and I’ll add them to the list. Thank you so much for your support.

Such an eye opener, and shocking that such a wealth of local, natural resource is going to waste! I’ll definitely be following your progress with much interest. I love natural yarn, and if home-grown, spun etc. so much the better 🙂

I have tried to source local fleece and apart from one friend who gave me her pet sheep’s fleece which couldn’t go off in the main flock as she is a different breed, I haven’t found any 🙁 I know I would buy fleece to spin, felt, or just use! I know I am not alone and I am not sure I would like to support a group that isn’t supporting the farmers in the first place 😛
If you get running I know I would be interested and yes to crowd funding too 🙂

It is difficult to buy fleece direct from the farmers – I’m not sure if local spinning guilds may be able to point you in the direction of small flocks with fleeces available and the poster below mentions Woolsack who have a list of sources. I’m not a spinner myself, but I know the guilds are very active and should be happy to help. Thank you so much for your support, it means so much!

Good luck with this Rachel, I will be following your project with interest. I could have cried at a recent Countryfile program when a statement was made that British wool is only fit for carpets. This is just not true.

Someone asked for ideas on supporting local farmers. The answer is to read, search and ask questions. Ravelry has at least 2 groups that I know of where the producer is selling fleeces directly to spinners. Woolsack has a great repository of resources selling British Wool and fibre. The Wovember site has very in-depth articles on wool, more will be coming up this November. There’s another group on Ravelry that is currently hosting a British Breeds swatchalong, there’s a podcaster who has had 2 very good interviews with small woollen businesses recently. There a couple of new online retailers, one who is sourcing wool that is 100% British grown, another is selling wool sourced from local, single flocks.

Its out there, we just have to step away from the obvious. Which is why any news of potential new sources is so exciting. Working together we can get British wool out there. The more small producers who make a success and get their story out there the more will think “I want a piece of that” and we all benefit.

I really don’t think anyone is really selling at inflated prices. Getting wool from a raw fleece is a long and manually intensive process and each actor in the process has to make some sort of profit.

Thank you Sara and for all the great links to places where people can read more and find British fleece and wool. I love your statement, ‘working together we can get British wool out there’ – there is definitely a lot of movement within the British knitting and crochet community to use more British yarns and by doing so it will raise the prices for the farmers.

I also think it’s important to consider supporting British wool in other ways, like buying British wool carpets where possible. Carpet manufacturing gives the volume of wool needed to keep the processors in business – here in Yorkshire you can still have raw wool scoured, spun and dyed to create a finished yarn, but if it wasn’t for carpets it would be much harder to keep the local wool industry alive. It would be a huge loss if it became no longer possible to make a yarn from start to finish in the UK.

I do think it’s necessary to acknowledge that there is quite a lot of British wool that isn’t the sort of wool people want to knit with, and finding uses for it in carpets and house insulation is better than throwing it away or burning it. Though the “only fit for carpets” message that seems to be applied to all British wool needs to go, too.

By the way, did you know that Rowan get their British wool yarn spun in Yorkshire, and then shipped to Germany to their distribution warehouse? By the time you buy it from a shop here in the UK it’s had a round trip of over 1000 miles!

Can I just add that the British Wool Marketing Board don’t actually buy the wool from farmers – they collect it, grade it into its separate qualities (handspinners will know how variable a fleece can be), bale it into 8 tonne lots and then auction it on behalf of producers. The price it fetches is therefore dictated by the global demand, not by the Board putting a sale tag on it. The income is then divided among the producers of that particular grade, after costs have been deducted.
Most yarn companies (even the smaller ones) will be sourcing wool through major buyers and processors, who themselves purchase at BWMB auctions. Wool has to go through many processes to become the saleable end product, and the end product price has to be one that consumers will pay – whether for yarn, carpets, garments, a cushion cover… it’s not the Wool Board that sets the price, it’s market demands, and that includes all of us.

Manufacturers work on a massive scale and demand wool in consistent repeatable qualities; this is what the BWMB are actually good at. They are also obliged to take, and find a market for, even the lowest quality wools.

That issue of Countryfile upset a lot of people – by repeating the same ‘British wool is only fit for carpets’, and then taking a beautiful fleece along to the weaver (not one of the rough Hill ones that even the shearer acknowledged as being of low value) they missed a golden opportunity to big up the industry.

A visit to Bradford to see the scale of operations in the wool industry is a real eye opener.

PS. I’m not a wool board employee or anything! Just a lifelong wool lover, a knitwear designer, and for the past half dozen years I’ve been involved in a project to grow the local wool industry. It’s been a vertical learning curve… : )

Thank you so much for all the info Sue (I got your email as well and will reply personally to that as well). It was ‘that’ episode of Countryfile which fired me up to take the Fleeced project further. I had a huge response on Twitter to a tweet I put out during the episode, there was even some discussion with Countryfile, but they don’t seem to want to discuss it any further which is a shame as it’s such an important issue. I am hoping to visit Bradford at some point and speak to the BWMB to learn more about their work and I’ll report back here on the blog.

Thank you Esther. I think the American wool market is slightly different and there is a freer movement of fleeces, but there are small producers doing amazing things alongside larger companies such as Quince & Co and Brooklyn Tweed. Buying pure British yarn is the best thing you can do to help, but I suspect a lot of American producers would benefit hugely from ‘local’ support too. Working with locally produced yarn is a global issue, it’s just that British wool is particularly under-valued.

I live in the states the same thing goes on here most people buried their fleeces years gone by it would be all the black fleeces would be buried it was shocking for a spinner just wanting to get a black fleece I also judge fleeces at a local show and I encourage The farmer to improve the fleeces so that they can make more money . It’s worked really well and know some good fleeces go for 15 and $20 a pound.
on the other hand if you sell your fleeces to the wool pool you could get 25 or $.50 a pound
We are also striving here to get people to buy local yarn and local fleeces it’s a slow process but I can see it working

Thank you so so much for this, I will defiantly try harder to by British wool in future, this has been such an eye opener. I wish you and your Dad all the very best for your new project. I just knit weave and crochet and will be following your story more now. Thank you again. If there is any way I can help just say please xx

I can’t stop thinking of the horror of fleece being destroyed. I love wool and Englend. Yes, I am American but I still think that small owners should be supported. Meaning that these farmers in England and in other places should get the best price for their fleece. I am willing to buy fleece. I would prefer ready to spin fleece. Being that it has been washed and prepared but I am still willing to buy and send to someone to prepare for me. I have bad arthritis so there is only so much I can prepare on my own. I pray that farmers get better prices and we crafters become aware. I know I will share this with all my friends and ask that they share as well.

The destruction of fleece terrible isn’t it Alexzandra. I’m not a spinner but I know my spinning friends love a fleece to work from. I think raw fleece sales and small processing factories are much more prevalent in the US – it would be great to have easier access to these types of places in the UK. Thank you for sharing the article and your support.

Very well written piece, as a former sheep farmer I well understand the added burden of receiving less for a fleece than it costs to shear the sheep. I also burned fleeces rather than hand them over to the wool board a few years ago when mule fleeces got as low as 50p each and it would have cost me more to deliver them than I would have got paid.
I look forward to seeing how your wool project goes, I believe there is room to pay the farmers a reasonable price for fleeces and still leave a profit for others in the chain so it will be good to see if this is the case. Keep us informed how it’s going.

Oh Helen, that’s heartbreaking. There has to be a better solution for sheep farmers and their fleeces and I’ll be posting regular updates as my journey continues – hopefully we can at least raise awareness and push prices up a bit

Fascinating and very sad reading, and goes a long way to explaining why, when I checked the wool selection on sale at John Lewis in Cardiff earlier this week, they basically only had Rowan (which I now see may not have been British wool anyway) and French wool. Coming from a land of sheep (New Zealand) and being a keen knitter, I was disgusted that they weren’t supporting local growers. I will be making more conscious wool-buying decisions in future!

Several of the big names in knitting yarn originally were UK companies and are assumed to be British eg Rowan, Patons, but are actually owned by international companies (that case US based Coats Crafts). Rowan employ UK based designers and have nominal ranges (Felted Tweed) that are UK wool, spun in the UK but most of their wool is sourced on the global market and spun out side the UK. In fact most knitting yarns from the big traditionally UK yarn distributors are manufactured outside the UK. The big companies, KingCole, Sirdar, Wendy, etc have produced UK wool lines in recent years directly because the consumer is asking questions. But sadly so few customers do ask where the wool really comes from.
I know ’cause I’m a wool shop owner and a farmer’s daughter wool isn’t as simple as it seems

Thanks for clarifying the info about ownership of the big ‘British’ yarn companies – it’s something I will be covering at a later date. I spoke to Rowan to find out which of their yarns are raised, spun or produced in the UK and had the following reply: “The Rowan British Sheep Breeds yarn is the only range that guarantees sourcing within the UK. The fleece is taken from the relevant sheep breed.” As you say, the vast majority of their yarns are now sourced internationally.
Is there more that wool shop owners could do to promote British yarns and educate their customers? I’d love to hear your thoughts at some point if it’s okay to get in touch?

Sadly Annie, only one of the Rowan yarns can be guaranteed to be British sourced and spun. I believe the company used to have more British yarns in the range but a lot of mills closed in the UK and there is cheaper production in Italy and China. I’m currently looking into the British yarns being produced by large wool companies including Rowan, Wendy, King Cole etc and will be featuring them on the blog in the future so keep an eye out for updates!

Excellent article. It’s appalling that such fabulous natural resources are being destroyed (though I can understand the reasons behind that) when there are many craftspeople who would gladly buy.

Agree entirely about British Wool Week – perhaps we (ie: the community of hand knitters, spinners, weavers, dyers) could do something to help? Maybe form some kind of association or club? I don’t know – but there must be something we could do…

I have been on a similar journey of learning about how wool is processed. We have a commercial flock and I have my own fleece flock.

As others have said, the BWMB sells all fleece of every grade and returns the monies pro-rata to the farmers. The top 10-15% of our commercial fleeces are lovely for handspinning, perfectly good enough for jumpers, hats, etc. However, the additional staffing costs to select these out from the rest of the clip, skirt and package for handspinners adds approx. £10 per fleece. So a fleece for which the Wool Board would pay us £3.50 needs to sell to handspinners at more than £13.50 to return more to us than we would get from the Wool Board.

We could take it to the next step and send the wool for processing ourselves. We’d still need to select the fleeces to be used, skirt hard (because the processors won’t do skirting, and if you don’t then it all ends up degrading the end product) and then get it to one of the processors for washing, combing and/or carding, and sell either as prepared fleece for spinning or have it millspun. To produce spinnable fibre this way would cost another £15-£20 per fleece. For yarn, add another £30 or more. I’d need to sell the yarn at £7-8/100g just to recover my costs to that point, never mind marketing costs.

And I’d still have fleeces I needed to send to the Wool Board, because they wouldn’t all be suitable for processing into yarn. But my average grade would be reduced as I would now only be sending the Wool Board the lesser quality fleeces, so my overall price per kilo would reduce.

I could write pages on this, but the conclusion I have come to is that for the average farmer, rearing white sheep for meat and/or for breeding animals, for whom fleece is a byproduct, the Wool Board (aided and abetted by the Campaign for Wool and other initiatives raising awareness and demand) is actually doing a really good job. We clip for two days, the sacks go off to the Wool Board, we get a cheque. The alternative is a huge amount of work, a significant outlay and uncertainty whether we ever recover as much per fleece.

So, to all your lovely readers wanting to know what to do to help the British sheep farmer, I say, please buy British wool yarn. The more you can buy of the super yarns being produced by all the producers, the large and the small, the more of the better quality fleece the Wool Board will be able to sell for this purpose, and the more will get returned to the farmers.

And to help farmers like Rachel and her dad, also buy the naturally coloured yarns, not just white and bright dyed yarns. Again, as demand for the fleece rises, so will the price the Wool Board can return to farmers.

Hey, I just found my way to your blog via Felix and Wovember. Great post, really detailed. Interesting to hear the situation over there (I’m in Ireland.)
Here farmers get a bit more for the fleeces from the sound of it – though little enough that plenty of them also burn the fleeces.
Great to hear you are making a yarn though!
We have a smallholding here and are doing the same. It has been really interesting going through the process of this – in particular sorting through the wool. The surprising thing for me has been that the source material – the wool, is the cheapest thing (its price in the finished yarn is practically negligible) and yet it is the most important element of the whole project.
I’ll keep following your blog now, glad to see you will be following it up!

Thank you so much Jules. I was reading an interesting article about Australian Merino prices and hadn’t thought about the non-merino farmers. If you know of anywhere I could get more information I’d really appreciate it xx

Hi Rachel…
I think most of the comments above already cover my feeling of being completely shocked and so angry at how totally rubbishly the sheep farmers are being treated…it must be heartbreaking and absolutely soul destroying to recieve such a pittance for all their care and work with the sheep…I’ve not been knitting long (but was crocheting) ….in the past I’ve bought wool for it’s softy sumptuousness rather than is it British and was the farmer paid a decent living for it…you’ve made me completley re-think any future purchases of wool I buy.
Are you able to recommend anywhere I could buy wool where the farmer has actually earnt something for all his time and hard work….like I say I’ve not been knitting for long and as I start on my knitting journey I’d very much like it be with some gorgeous sheepy smelling British wool on my needles.
If you get to spin your dad’s fleeces then I would love to purchase some of the spun wool from you, and look forward to reading about your spinning adventures.
Your dad must be a very special man who is obviously not in sheep farming for the untold wealths he’s earning, but must genuinely love what he does (please give him a huge hug as I think he deserves one)….and as for Lou…I could watch that video all day.

I am completley horrified, speechless and very angry. I feel so cross about this I have cancelled an order I placed last night from one of the big on line suppliers. Count me in Rachel, you have my support. As a side, I understand the alpaca farmers are in a similar situation here in the uk too.

I run a small business hand-dyeing wool. I buy in skeins from mills in the UK and other UK sellers. I read with interest about your frustration with the UK wool industry’s organisation and inability to capitalise on the provenance of the UK national herd and the breeds that compose it. I thought you may lie to hear how it looks from our end.

My business is in a sense on the other side of the Wool Marketing Board (WMB) from the shepherd and between it and the final user, the knitter, crocheter or weaver.

1. I would love to be able to buy UK single breed skeins from the WMB and have attempted to do this in the past. When the skeins arrived they came with lovely WMB tags so that I could label the skeins after dyeing. Reading the small print on the tags it was only then apparent to me then that the wool was only guaranteed to be at least 50% British wool! I was shocked and very disappointed. Wool Marketing Board British wool is only guaranteed to be 50% British! Why? It’s not good enough. Who’s benefiting from this policy?

2. I sell at wool shows and some of these are dedicated to British wool. At these, wool from the Falkland Islands is nominated British. I have no issue with this but – why can we have wool that is 100% Falkland Islands but not wool that is 100% UK!?

3. I’ve only a few years in the wool business and I know many people have a lifetime or even generations of experience but I have heard such conflicting things about the WMB’s “monopoly”. I’ve been told categorically that both the fleeces have to be sold to the WMB and that you can sell them to whoever you want to. What exactly is the status of the WMB’s “monopoly”? There is obviously, one way or another, a very common misconception about this.

Finally some of our customers will talk about the, provenance of the wool, breed, Britishness, etc. They will talk about provenance being important but when it comes to buying their yarn they ignore that factor. There is definitely a need for end-user education in this area.

This is a very interesting post ! You have taken a great step with your dad ! During slow fashion october, i wrote on my blog about the importance as a knitter of knowing my yarn. And it’s not that easy indeed because 100 % labels are not a guarantee of really knowing the origin and the producing conditions of the final yarn. Most of the times, you just don’t know where the fleeces are coming from (and much less how it was paied to the shepherd !). I have started a “ethical yarn” section on my blog where i could make a list of yarn brands that i had the opportunity to knit with and who produces yarn really traceable from the fleece to the knitter and who really value wool from the breeder. I’m not looking forward a whole round up of ethical yarns as i’m not experienced enough to do that and as you can already find these kind of lists. What i want to do is making a list of yarns that i know, that i tried and that i can recommend for their ethical dimensions (from the fleece to the knitter). I started my section with De Rerum Natura, a french brand i wrote about in the following post http://woollydream.blogspot.fr/2015/10/slow-fashion-october-know-your-yarn.html . But as a french knitter, british wool is also part of my local resources and i really want to hear more from your “save the fleeces” adventure ! What you would like to end with is exactly what i’m looking for as a knitter !
Here is the link to my embryonic “ethical yarn” section http://woollydream.blogspot.fr/p/ethical-yarn.html

Thank you so much Sarah and do keep an eye on teh blog as I will be making announcements when it is ready to buy. Interestingly farmers of Australian Merino command a really high price for their fleece – I wish British farmers were receiving anything close to that!

This is horrendous, such a lot of waste. I thought Rowan was British but at least they sell some genuine British wool. It is getting more and more difficult to support local produce as companies are bought out. Good luck with your research and I hope Country File do a longer piece on it

Love your piece but…one thing I would like to correct you on is the British Woold Board do NOT buy fleeces from the farmers/producers they collect it in, sort it , grade it and sell it on the open wool market auctions worldwide on behalf of the farmer/producer. It is not them that regulates the prices paid and not them that are fleecing the farmer/producer. Prices go up and down due to demand and quality. All this information can be found on their website.

Hi Lisa, you are right that BWB don’t buy the fleeces but I do feel they could be doing more to get better prices and support British wool producers, enabling them to get the best price possible for their fleece. A large proportion of British wool is exported and in turn we are importing fleece from China and beyond to spin which to me is kind of crazy! I am attending an open day up in Bradford where I hope to learn all about how the Wool Board operates and will be back with a blog post all about it. Thanks for flagging this up!

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